Muktuk and Dunnuk???

The question was posed to me recently-do I eat muktuk and dunnuk? I'm not really sure what dunnuk is so you'll have to fill me in - I googled it and got nothing - then I asked Jim Paul and got nothing. He did think that it might be walrus maybe? Anyway, I have eaten deep-fried muktuk, but only once. I'm not big on the whale blubber thing but I did it to be polite and it actually wasn't that horrible. Jim's Mom actually has a name for me - she calls me Amshawa-she says it means "white girl who likes Indian food".Whether this is true or not will never be known, as the Tlingit language is not written down, only passed on orally, so I'm taking her word for it. At first she was surprised when I would come over to her house and eat all of the Sea Cucumber, crab, clams, salmon,and halibut that they were cooking. Don't even get me started on the big Spot Prawns. I embarrass myself. Also, in the spring here, the natives go out and collect seaweed of various kinds and dry it in their yards under the sun. Then, they store it in ziploc bags and eat it crunchy, broken up into big pots of steamed rice with soysauce. All of it is good to me, and I eat it up. However, most white people up here don't eat "native food" as they call it. Or at least not the way that the natives prepare it. They do things a little differently.Funny story though - we took Arlene (Jim's Mom) to Ketchikan once on the ferry to go shopping at Wal-Mart when we were still living in Southeast Alaska. She had just won a parka as a door prize at atribal meeting a couple of weeks before so she thought she would wearit on our shopping trip. When you first get to the ferry terminal,you have to drive through the area where all of the HUGE cruise shipsdock that are on their way into the interior. So there are literallythousands of people that get off these boats from all over the worldto shop in Ketchikan before they head out. As we were driving(slowly) through the crowded area, some tourists yelled for us tostop and offered Arlene $50 to take her picture. They said they hadnever seen a real eskimo before, and they wanted her on theirvacation film. So, in her parka, she smiled huge, pocketed their$50, and played "eskimo for a day". It was SO funny. First of all,Inupiaq or Inuit is the PC term for an "eskimo". Eskimo is actuallya derogatory term for what they are - and they are only found WAY upnorth in Alaska and Canada -the rest of Alaska Natives are Tlingit,Haida, Tsimshian, Athabascan, and a couple of others that I can'tremember right now. But thinking that any round-faced native inAlaska is an Inuit would be very very wrong. FYI.Now, another interesting story for the day - there is an island inthe Aleutian chain called Attu that was occupied by the Japaneseduring WWII. In History, we always hear about Pearl Harbor, but theJapanese actually held the entire island of Attu first. It is theonly time that U.S. soil was held by foreign invaders since 1812.Native Alaskans were the only ones who could manage to sneak in andtake the island back after bloody bloody hand to hand combat. Therewas also a HUGE U.S. military force there too, obviously, but theyfailed the first couple of times in their mission to take back theisland. They were ill-prepared - ill-clothed, and ill-shoed for whatthey had to do. Thousands of U.S. troops were hauled out of therewith frostbite, hypothermia, and more fatal problems. Anyway, wefinally prevailed and took back the island - but it was almost a verydifferent WWII for us. Who knew? Anyway, in 1987, the U.S.Department of the Interior allowed the Japanese government to erect amonument to their dead on Attu - it looks like a giant Christmasornament on a hill. No one knew this until recently when a group ofveterans travelled out there to visit the graves of their fallenmates - and now they are furious. They are trying to get thegovernment to take down the monument. It's on the front page of thepaper today - we'll see what happens. But it's a pretty interestingplace - the beaches are literally made out of shell casings - hugeones from various gunships, handguns, rifles, cannons, etc.Everywhere you look or step there are metal cylinders under yourfeet.Well, so there is some different info for the day -everything isgoing great with the house - things are progressing forward - andyesterday we got to lock in a freakishly low interest rate of 5.5% soyahoo!!! I hate that the housing market is so bad right now but itsure did turn out to be great for us!
In the meantime, the sun is shining brightly today andI think I shall plan an outing. I must cross-country ski before allthe snow melts - I'm already running out - I have to drive to the dogpark to ski around it now instead of skiing to the park from myapartment! Boo hoo. But I am really looking forward to summerthough. I kinda like it when the sun sets at midnight or 1 a.m. andcomes back up at 4:30am. That only happens for about a month or so(half of July, half of August) but it is super cool and creates kindof an "edgy" environment where people get lots of things done aroundhere! Love, Jamie C